About Us
Jefferson County Community Ships for Youth, Inc.- (SHIPS) is our local State Family Connection. SHIPS primary focus is to improve child safety and school success.
Jefferson County Community Ships for Youth, Inc. (SHIPS) collaborative work with partners to provide and coordinate support services to ensure that children are safe, healthy, and ready for school. All our children need to have a safe and healthy environment to continue school success to become self-sufficient adults.
As a result of SHIPS collaborative efforts to assure that children are safe, healthy, and successful in school; we implement services, programs, and projects that enable us to address the following identified strategies:
Health and school readiness:
- Kinship Caregiver Cohort – Senior Help In Parenting Support (SHIPS) project offer a comprehensive array of support services to grandparents and other kinship caregivers with information, skills, and resources designed to enhance their ability to provide effective care for the young relatives they are parenting. Services are designed to:
Promote permanency and child well-being by supporting early and stable relative/kinship placements to prevent children from coming into or re-entering foster care
• Increase caregiver capacity and improve family functioning
• Support the educational, physical, and mental health of children
• Support the physical and mental health of caregivers
• Increase access to and utilization of community-based supports and services - Community Back to School Event – This is a community event to provide supplies children need to reenter the school year with the necessary supplies and equipment. Community services agencies introduce parents to resources within their own community.
Family Functioning:
- Naloxone Implementation – Overdose reversal drug kits and training provided to Schools within Jefferson County
- Juvenile Delinquency Prevention – Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Project creates a diversion program for first-time juvenile offenders and children in need of services to keep teens out of the court system.
- Community Conversations on race and equity – Race, equity, and inclusion training for collaborative members and staff, utilizing REI facilitators.
- Promoting Safe and Stable Families (PSSF) – PSSF Relative Caregiver/Kinship Family services offer a comprehensive array of support services to grandparents and other kinship caregivers with information, skills, and resources designed to enhance their ability to provide effective care for the young relatives they are parenting.
- First Offenders Program – The program provides first offenders with education and life skills, enabling them to manage anger and abstain from substance abuse to avoid the consequences of a criminal record.
About Georgia Family Connection
Georgia Family Connection is the only statewide network of its kind in the country with partners in all 159 counties working toward measurably better outcomes for our children, families, and communities. This gives us a unique vantage point—not only to see the big picture—but also to operate effectively at a local level.
We disentangle the mess of barriers, service gaps, and inefficiencies obscuring progress for our most vulnerable families. We do that by connecting our partners to resources, helping coordinate and manage efforts, and empowering our communities to craft local solutions based on local decisions.
Georgia Family Connection Partnership (GaFCP) represents and promotes Georgia Family Connection’s work, provides expertise in planning and governance, administers the state-appropriated funds for the local Collaboratives, sets standards of excellence, and helps Collaboratives evaluate their progress.
The state’s designated KIDS COUNT grantee, GaFCP also provides state agencies and policymakers with current, reliable data they need to inform decisions about improving conditions for the communities they serve.
Our Work
At Georgia Family Connection, we work to ensure that all children are healthy, primed for school, and succeed when they get there; families are stable, self-sufficient, and productive; and communities are vibrant, robust, and thriving.
None of these result areas stand in isolation. They overlap. By collaborating across sectors to address them, we nurture children and families who thrive in vibrant communities—everywhere. Because we work toward measurably better outcomes for everyone.
